Books of The Times; The Heart of Darkness Beats Again

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: April 11, 1989

In 1871, the journalist Henry Morton Stanley was commissioned by The New York Herald to go to Africa to find David Livingstone, and he found the missing explorer on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, deep in the heart of the continent. Livingstone declined to return to civilization and died in a local village two years later; Stanley went on to lead several further expeditions and earn fame as an explorer himself.

From these bare bones of a story, the Swedish writer Lennart Hagerfors has fashioned a fiercely imagined novel that turns Stanley's journey into a Conradian parable of innocence and evil. Indeed ''The Whales in Lake Tanganyika'' becomes a variation on ''The Heart of Darkness,'' a variation in which Stanley begins by playing the role of Marlow - that is, a detached seeker of truth - and ends by becoming Kurtz, a man consumed by the very darkness he sought to banish. The story is narrated, in journal form, by John Shaw, one of the two white men to accompany Stanley on his journey.

In real life, little is known about Shaw: he appears only fleetingly in Stanley's book, ''How I Found Livingstone,'' and then only in an unflattering light. As imagined by Mr. Hagerfors, however, Shaw emerges as a full-fledged character, whose own descent into madness serves as an added metaphor for Stanley's journey. When we first meet him, Shaw seems a most unlikely candidate for such a strenuous expedition - a man who dislikes work and enjoys alcohol and women, the ''creature comforts and simple pleasures'' of life. It is out of sheer passivity and inertia that he allows Stanley to sign him up.

Stanley, in contrast, comes across as a Nietzschean strongman, a proto-colonialist, obsessed with the white man's burden. He speaks in overwrought prose, animated in equal parts by hostility and sentiment. ''I am subject to other laws,'' he tells Shaw, as they prepare to embark. ''I am strong and strive for strength. I am the bright light that looks for the feeble light. I am the clear thought that looks for the clear feeling.''

As they push into the interior, Stanley makes it clear that he will tolerate no dissension in the ranks: stragglers are beaten and humiliated; malcontents, threatened with abandonment in the bush. ''It was a horrifying assemblage of human beings that passed before me,'' writes Shaw of the caravan. ''The deserters who had been shackled instead of flogged, on Bombay's orders, looked like the most pitiful slaves. The porters and soldiers were emaciated. A dangerous fire burned in the gaze of some, while others stared with empty, unseeing eyes. All were gray with dirt, and many limped, their loincloths tattered, their stench hard to endure.''

Indeed, Shaw quickly finds that the physical challenges of the expedition are almost more than he can manage. The heat, the bugs, the smell of excrement and gangrenous flesh, the difficulties of balancing on the back of a donkey as the expedition makes its way through a snake-infested forest - all are described in wrenchingly visceral, if occasionally humorous, terms.

Yet at the same time, Mr. Hagerfors - who grew up in the Congo where his parents were missionaries - manages to convey to us the almost paradisial beauty of this continent: a place where the plains and forests contain ''an emptiness that is almost euphoric,'' a place where butterflies and waterfalls create the illusion of Eden. It is this unspoiled land that Stanley and his followers want to ravish and subdue.

As Shaw recalls Stanley saying: ''After the success of our expedition, European settlers would come streaming into Africa. The savannah would be plowed and sown with wheat and rye. The wild beasts would be shot or domesticated, railroads would be built across the continent, people would ride around on fleet-footed zebras, and the forests would be cut down for buildings and fuel for the factories that would spring up by the railroads. The Negroes would be baptized and taught to work. On the navigable rivers, shining white British steamers would transport goods and people.''

The price of this colonial dream, of course, is a high one, as Shaw's observations of barbaric slave traders and unscrupulous ivory merchants make clear. In his own case, the African adventure leads to disorientation and madness, documented by his increasingly windy and abstract prose. In the case of Stanley, it leads to more and more brutality, more and more excursions into hatred and fear. ''The great master carries evil inside him,'' says one of the black overseers he's hired. ''He cannot help it, he does not want to do evil, but he is forced to do it. If he were a black man, we would kill him. Now he may kill us all here at Makata.''

Livingstone, too, appears to have succumbed to the darkness he discovered at the heart of the continent; he has become Stanley's pale alter ego. ''I knew that he would find me,'' the old explorer tells Shaw. ''He needs me. To him I am the soft fingertips of his firm hand, the gentle smile on his determined face. Once I bore within me a raging passion that was so great only the African continent could contain it. But Africa devoured it. It was not enough. Yet the passion brought with it a monster that has only begun to show its face. I am afraid of that monster.''

Toward the end of the novel, the echoes of Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness'' grow somewhat overly pronounced, making the reader aware of just how large the shadow of that earlier book remains. For the most part, however, Mr. Hagerfors has succeeded in using his assured story-telling powers to turn history into myth, and in doing so, to create a compelling and original fiction.